Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social), page 2

@dymaxion lol, fair. I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to sustain 12 solid hours of foreplay though. 😂

The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully.

Love wins! 🎉🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️❤️

The real reason to write rust is that sex is good, but have you ever tried a successful build after fighting with the esp-idf+cargo toolchains for 12 hours?

@schoenswetter almost – I'm thinking specifically about newly created accounts, which, apparently Mastodon already supports!! https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112209005598142179

I'm clearly behind the times; awesome to see the fediverse blazing ahead of established monopoly networks.

One must imagine Sisyphus listening to "Happy"

On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.

Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow *me*

If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.

Fediverse apps should do this.

@ch0ccyra1n like https://github.com/sfomuseum/go-activitypub from @thisisaaronland - exciting times!

I expect (hope?) we'll see a lot of these. Like apache/nginx/etc and the many micro web frameworks in every language. 😁

I'm not sure if it's new or if I'm just really bad at paying attention, but I just learned about it and I'm so excited about #fedify: https://unstable.fedify.dev/

I think systems that are shaped like fedify are one of the key things needed to really open experimentation and exploration of the possibilities that the fediverse affords.

I feel like billionaires are letting the world down.

So much wealth, so much power, but as far as I can tell there won't be a flock of supersonic jets with transparent upper fuselages following the eclipse.

I mean, there are ~2500 billionaires in the world, and *none* of them are going to experience five full hours of totality.

Really, it's a complete failure of imagination.

@brandon @evan my main observation here is that end-users should never have to think about or manage their keys, because (1) they don't care and (2) ultimately they will lose their keys.

For those reasons alone, key management is a hard problem, and will always remain a hard problem.

If an architectural solution depends on keys, service providers need to be prepared to reissue those keys on behalf of their users, and the architecture should be capable of handling disjointed key rotation.

@mcc the other historical story here that I can offer is that the xmpp pubsub spec (xep-60) was around 350 printed pages. I sat down with Peter Saint Andre and @hildjj at OSCON in 2007 and we wrote out a minimal profile of the spec in Notepad.exe that was *two* printed pages *including* example XML stanzas. That "tiny spec[k]" formed the basis of the functional pubsub Interop that @ralphm and I implemented between Twitter and Jaiku, basically over one evening at Social Web FooCamp.

@mcc a lot of people I know are asking these questions!

Once upon a time (mid-2008? Oh, I was so naive) I tried to build an "apache/cgi-bin for building cross-protocol decentralized social tools." At the time that was xmpp, pubsubhubbub, RSS, and indieweb-i-guess. I maintain that it's still possible with the modern set of photos, and probably easier than one would reckon (and probably harder, too). I'm not sure what the modern metaphor would be (so many options!)

Put another way, if we get this right for the Fediverse AND upgrade our email addresses to support ActivityPub+Webfinger, a robust response to spam across the Fediverse that takes into account social connections could make [SMTP-based] email much less prone to spam and phishing attacks than centralized server- and content-filtering-focused attempts have been to date.

With ActivityPub+Webfinger, we also know precisely who sent the message, with cryptographic signatures for verification, unlike email where From-address-level signatures have proven an elusive goal. The best you can do with SMTP in most cases is to verify that "a server that's trusted by the domain sent the message" but there are so many exceptions due to SMTP's architecture that it's really a crapshoot.

Random unsolicited thought (disclaimer: I haven't been watching or participating in the spam response at all):

One of the main differences between social/activitypub spam and email spam is that contact lists are largely open, and programmable querying is possible. What does that mean?

If you see a new follow request or mention, you can check to see if anyone else you know follows that person. If not, the spam propensity is much higher. Email servers can't do this [without centralization].

@jdp23 @noracodes @inquiline 100% – really well put. I am a huge proponent of open-federation-as-a-rule, and I think it's the only way we "win" *but* I also think that there are millions of communities that for many and varied reasons need to break the rules.

I personally find it quite disturbing how "religious" (or, deeply politically aligned) the federations have become, and how quickly. We have way more in common, and I wish we could all work together more intentionally.

@jdp23 @noracodes @inquiline I don't think it's very different from "the real world"; walking down the street involves some forms of consent, but doesn't grant many others.

We can't exist in a world where we police who is allowed to exist in which spaces, and I don't think we should. Instead, we build relationships that are deeper than passing someone by anonymously with consent, and value those relationships more.

@jdp23 @noracodes @inquiline
The difference between the fediverse and e.g. twitter is that we have agency here; on twitter, we never really had agency – whether it was from the algorithm, or over the withdrawal (or granting of) consent.

I help run a small mastodon server using the hometown fork, and consent for distribution there is scoped to a local community. It's in that flexibility that we might find our way forward – not by wide-scale cultural wars that only serve to diminish agency.

@boris I'm so disappointed rn. 😞

I guess yogurt gonna yogurt. 🙃

@evan have you been jammin' with @danhon or is this just coincidence?